Christie McDonald

Christie McDonald is the Smith Research Professor of French Language and Literature in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and Research Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University.  From 2000-2006, she served as Chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, and from 2010-2017, she and her husband, Michael Rosengarten, served as Masters/Faculty Deans at Mather House.

McDonald is the author or editor of many books and articles on literature in an interdisciplinary context.  A literary historian, as well as cultural critic and theorist, she  has worked on eighteenth and twentieth to twenty-first-century French thought and literature in a comparative context. She has also published in the areas of literature and philosophy, anthropology, feminist theory, and the arts (music and painting).

  • Encounters in the Arts, Literature, and Philosophy

    Encounters in the Arts, Literature, and Philosophy

    “Written in honor of Christie McDonald, whose work has analyzed encounters from Rousseau to Proust to Derrida, the fascinating essays in this collection do much more than celebrate a remarkable career; they theorize the concept of the encounter, which lies at the heart of the creative process and at the very foundation of what we…

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  • The Life and Art of Anne Eisner

    The Life and Art of Anne Eisner

    An American Artist between Cultures In this radiant biography, the painter Anne Eisner springs to life as a figure of formidable originality. Leaving behind the art world in which she throve in New York, Eisner moved with her lover and eventual husband the anthropologist Patrick Putnam to his domain in the Ituri Forest in the…

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  • Femmes et Literature Tome I

    Femmes et Literature Tome I

    Femmes et littérature, une histoire culturelle offre pour la première fois un ample panorama de la présence des femmes en littérature, du Moyen Âge au XXIe siècle, en France et dans les pays francophones. Tome I: le Moyen Âge au dix-huitième siècle….

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  • Femmes et Litterature Tome II

    Femmes et Litterature Tome II

    Femmes et littérature, une histoire culturelle offre pour la première fois un ample panorama de la présence des femmes en littérature, du Moyen Âge au XXIe siècle, en France et dans les pays francophones. Tome II: le dix-neuvième siècle au XXIe siècle….

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  • French Global

    French Global

    Recasting French literary history in terms of the cultures and peoples that interacted within and outside of France’s national boundaries, this volume offers a new way of looking at the history of a national literature, along with a truly global and contemporary understanding of language, literature, and culture….

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  • PROUST and the Arts

    PROUST and the Arts

    Proust and the Arts brings together expert Proustians and renowned interdisciplinary scholars in a major reconsideration of the novelist’s relation to the arts….

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  • Rousseau and Freedom

    Rousseau and Freedom

    Proust and the Arts brings together expert Proustians and renowned interdisciplinary scholars in a major reconsideration of the novelist’s relation to the arts….

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  • The Proustian Fabric

    The Proustian Fabric

    The association of ideas became the foundation of Freudian psychoanalysis, informed the nascent semiology of Saussure, and characterized the literary works of Sterne, Joyce, Woolf, and especially Marcel Proust….

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  • Images of Congo

    Images of Congo

    Images of Congo explores the life and work of New York artist Anne Eisner who lived in the former Belgian Congo (now DRC) during the 1940s and 1950s….

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  • Tansformations in Personhood and Culture After Theory

    Tansformations in Personhood and Culture After Theory

    The essays in this collection focus on the essentially moral desire within humanistic inquiry to seek a point of contact between personal experience and intellectual reflection….

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  • Painting My World The Art of Dorothy Eisner

    Painting My World The Art of Dorothy Eisner

    Dorothy Eisner (1906-1984) was an American painter whose career spanned more than seven decades….

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  • The Ear of the Other

    The Ear of the Other

    Discusses the philosophy of Nietzsche, the nature of autobiography, the difficulties of translation, and the significance of the author’s philosophy for psychoanalysis and literature….

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  • Dispositions

    Dispositions

    Quatre essais sur les écrits de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Stéphane Mallarmé, Marcel Proust et Jacques Derrida…

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  • The Dialogue of Writing

    The Dialogue of Writing

    Essays in Eighteenth-century French Literature…

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